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Dancing Matt profits from YouTube jig

YouTube's most enduring star, Matt Harding, has turned a goofy
dance he devised in a Brisbane office block into a global marketing
colossus, which now includes the lucrative speaker circuit and a
book deal.

Like reality TV winners, most YouTube stars are back to their
day jobs within months but Harding has kept his jig going for four
years since he appeared in his first web video.

During that time he has been paid to travel to the four corners
of the globe three times, simply to be filmed dancing badly at
various locations and in front of some of the world's most famous
landmarks.

Now Harding, 31, is the face of a new
global marketing campaign by Visa, which has been running since
late last month on television in eight countries, including
Australia.

In an email interview, Harding said he had also been hired to
appear in several travel agency advertisements and by Google to
create a new layer for Google Earth, showing off his favourite
dancing locations.

He has also appeared on hundreds of talk shows around the world
- including The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, the Jimmy Kimmel
show and The Tyra Banks Show - and is frequently paid to
speak at events and conferences.

"Speaking has become an unanticipated side occupation that I
very much enjoy. I'm not very good at it, but I'm learning a lot,"
Harding wrote in his online journal after returning from a speaking
engagement at a gathering of animal-feed salespeople in
Minneapolis.

By May, Harding said he would have his first book in stores and
he has not ruled out travelling the world again to make new
clips.

He said the book would be a collection of anecdotes about making
his videos.

Asked how long he expected to be able to milk his internet
celebrity for cash, he said he had no idea.

"I don't pursue projects like this. I just make the videos and
sometimes other cool opportunities come along," Harding, who keeps
his earnings close to his chest, said.

For the Visa project, the financial terms of which have not been
disclosed, Harding travelled to China, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore
and Vietnam for two weeks with his girlfriend, keeping a diary on
his blog.

"It was sort of like a paid vacation," he said.

But that's nothing compared with the travelling the pair did for
Harding's latest YouTube video, which went up five months ago and has already
garnered 13 million hits.

For the 4½-minute clip, Harding spent 14 months travelling
to 42 countries. He did his geeky jive with Bollywood dancers in
Gurgaon, India, with humpback whales in Tonga, with lemurs in
Madagascar and even in zero gravity in Nellis Airspace, Nevada.

That trip began just months after Harding returned from a world
tour of 39 countries for his second internet video, which was published on YouTube in June 2006 and
has notched up 12 million views.

Unlike most viral web hits, Harding's popularity has increased
with time. The 2006 video took a little over two years to reach 10
million hits but the latest one passed that mark in 83 days. Both
were sponsored by Stride gum.

After high school, Harding, following his dad's advice, decided
to skip university and become a video game developer. His career
took him to Brisbane's Pandemic Studios in 2000 for 2½ years.
I was there that he devised his now famous jig.

His first video, filmed while travelling with a co-worker and
published on his website in January 2005 before the days of
YouTube, was made simply as a running gag for family and friends
but quickly spread virally across the web. It was viewed about 2
million times.